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Apple Vision Pro review

wsj.com

721–730 of 1001 posts

Re: Apple Vision Pro review

#721
post #537
post #505

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This iPhone trope has gotta die. I worked at Motorola when the iPhone came out. Every single engineer knew this thing would blow everything else out of the water. It was one of the largest leaps in consumer tech devices ever. I assure you the Vision Pro is nowhere close to that.

The better analogy is probably something like the Apple Watch. Apple certainly wasn't the first smartwatch, but anyone who owned one before that was obviously a geek (said lovingly). Apple made the first mainstream acceptable smartwatch by smoothing over a lot of the complaints about their competitors, while adding some of their own in the process, just like the Vision Pro. It took a few iterations, but today people…

> Apple made the first mainstream acceptable smartwatch by smoothing over a lot of the complaints about their competitors,

Really? Why do Apple fanboys make these kinda claims.. same as wireless Bluetooth pods, or fingerprint readers, or faceID. There are ample examples of these done well on the hardware side prior. The main advantage Apple has is its seamless integration with software, which of course it pairs well with iOS because nothing else is allowed to.

Re: Apple Vision Pro review

#722
post #630

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That's giving way too much credit to a corporation. As an anchoring point, Apple couldn't figure out a better solution for movie watching than Google's or Amazon's offering (cheaper yet better than the Apple TV), and I don't think the concept is flawed in any way. If anything, it's probably healthy to see Apple stretch and hit some walls, try new ideas that might or might not succeed, and overall experiment in the op…

disagree. Apple TV is fine albeit solving boring problems. This is a solution that creates 20 new problems. > too much credit to a corporation What does this mean? Are indie developers supposed to do a better job than a corp (see: a group of people) with billions in R&D?

Apple TV is fine, but for instance it took them such a long time to get a remote with buttons that can be recognized in the dark. And that weird push for games when there's no first party controller. The storage tiers that made no sense. All in all it has been such a weird product.

> too much credit

Sorry for the weird turn of phrase. I just think Apple is a company like any other, with sometimes good ideas, sometimes bad idea, sometimes they'll hit the jackpot and sometimes they battle the EU.

Apple not figuring a good approach to a problem doesn't feel like any further indication of how hard the problem is. I mean, we could say they haven't figured out how to charge a wireless mouse either.

Re: Apple Vision Pro review

#723

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love how people just rewrite history on the internet lol. Iphone 1 was a collosal PoC. Slow, most of web didnt work. Its only appeal was the full touchscreen, which of course sucked to type on, but looked cool (which is the reason people bought it mostly). Everyone that needed mobile compute functionality was still on Blackberry and some other devices. There was a time during early 2010s where the iphone was better…

I think if you talked to someone working on Meta Quest they would say this is going to blow the competitors away. If you talk to a reviewer for a tech magazine they’re going to complain about any detail they can find in the 1.0 launch of a new product line as if it’s a colossal failure (aka PoC).

Quest and Vive weren't great, but they actually had working VR that set the stage for subsequent development.

Iphone 1 set the stage for tech jewelry.

Re: Apple Vision Pro review

#724

> Does it live up to the stratospheric hype? Not so much. Oh sorry, that's from CNET's review of the first iPhone in 2007: https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/original-iphone-review/ It's way too early to tell if this product line will succeed in the long term. Will the first gen Vision Pro be a runaway success? Of course not! Will later generations look as obvious as the iPhone does now? I sure hope so! For comparison,…

None of these articles are reviewing the future product line: they are merely reviewing the one product you can buy today. Of that product sucks but its successors in a year or two will be great--or even if this product with some major software update becomes awesome--that is entirely irrelevant. The original reviews of the iPhone weren't wrong just because some different later thing that was part the same product line earned a better review.

Re: Apple Vision Pro review

#725

Anyone remember when Memoji came out? It was pretty mid. Lots of problems with it. Now it's really good. It works really well now. Personas are like that. Same thing with eye tracking. This whole product is 90% of the way there. But the next 9% is just as hard as that original 90%. Apple is releasing it now to push it to 99%. It'll get better.

wait, Memoji is still a thing?

I have literally never had anybody I know ever send me a Memoji. Maybe there's a different community that uses it, but I don't know who that is.

Re: Apple Vision Pro review

#726
post #276

Lots of surprises on the downside from all the reviews. Pass through much more limited in quality with motion blur, pixelation, distortions, limited color and dynamic range. The eye tracking driven input method which was seen as holy grail turns out to be annoying after a while because people don't naturally always look at what they want to click on. Personas straight up aren't ready. The lack of AR features is the b…

Wow, I remember when it was announced, to press materials gave the impression that it would be closely integrable with macOS. I was picturing using VS Code from within it. Which I guess I could do if I set up VNC... but I'm not paying thousands for that. Is an AR productivity tool really so hard? Apple owns the whole stack here. Nintendo can do Mario Kart AR in your living room with an RC car, but I can't get unlimit…

I'm surprised we still don't have an X-like "render on the drawing device" model. Rather than sending pixel, you send a higher abstraction model from which the UI can be drawn.

Re: Apple Vision Pro review

#727
post #698
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Nevermind cooking, TV, and timers, I'd consider this solely to serve as a portable monitor. With remote work, that could be very handy. When I travel I never take an external monitor, so all work gets done on a 16 or 14 inch screen. This could be a game changer, like adding a large display. Could also be very handy when working on planes, and for working from outdoor locations like parks (which I love to do). I find…

the problem with using this in plane is you cannot have your macbook in your carry on bag. You have to remove it from your bag and open the screen lid and see it with your vision pro headset to connect to it. This is not maybe an issue if you are flying business class and with economy class I don't find it comfortable - plane tables are too small and macbook pro 16'' too big and heavy for such environment.

I agree using a macbook is not comfortable in economy, but it’s what I do as my default, the only difference in using the headset is I won’t have to look down at a sharp angle (which is usually fine for a while but can hurt if done for too long).

Re: Apple Vision Pro review

#728
post #276

Lots of surprises on the downside from all the reviews. Pass through much more limited in quality with motion blur, pixelation, distortions, limited color and dynamic range. The eye tracking driven input method which was seen as holy grail turns out to be annoying after a while because people don't naturally always look at what they want to click on. Personas straight up aren't ready. The lack of AR features is the b…

I can’t get over how goofy and stupid it looks, and how awkward those gestures are.

There’s a video circulating of someone cooking while wearing it and gingerly pinching a virtual timer and placing it on a pot of boiling pasta.

It looks so stupid that I couldn’t help but laugh out loud.

Maybe younger people might think differently but for me, this stuff is dead on arrival because of simply how uncool and stupid it makes you look when you use it.

Re: Apple Vision Pro review

#729

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the issues listed by @zmmmmm are the same issues plaguing other VR headsets for a decade now: motion blur, pixelation, distortions, fake looking colors. Apple didn’t fix any of them.

> fake looking colors I never heard this complain before. Can you explain more?

See the video in the OP at timestamp 5:00 to 5:20. The review from The Verge touched on it as well; essentially, at the end of the day, it's still a bunch of displays showing you camera feeds of the real world. And both displays and cameras have a lot of flaws—low field of view, motion blur, pixelation in low lighting, and a much more limited set of colors compared to our actual eyes.

VR avoids this since they just make up their own designed world instead, while most AR glasses avoid this by having actual transparent glasses and reflecting images off them instead. The Vision Pro is more ambitious and tries to pull off both AR and VR, resulting in these compromises.

Re: Apple Vision Pro review

#730

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is how Windows Remote Desktop used to work - it would forward GDI instructions to be rendered remotely. It falls apart as UIs got richer, browsers in particular: they're entirely composited in-app and not via GDI, because GDI isn't an expressive enough interface. So you end up shipping a lot of bitmaps, and to optimize you need to compress them. You might as well compress the whole screen then. https://www.anand…

I wonder how this works exactly. RDP lets me connect to a single monitor Win 11 host and display it on my client's three monitors. Everything is super smooth including browsers (I am connecting via Ethernet). Is the host managing the three screens or does the RDC do it on the client's side?

Note the "used to work" modern RDP will negotiate some form of image (or video) based compression for transferring data[1]. You can even share an X11 desktop over RDP using freerdp-shadow-cli.

1: e.g. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecs/windows_protocol...

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